Blackstone Made Money on Credit-Default Swaps With This One Weird Trick

The Blackstone Codere trade -- in which Blackstone Group LP bought credit-default swaps on troubled Spanish gaming company Codere SA, then agreed to roll a $100 million revolver for Codere on favorable terms in exchange for Codere agreeing to make an interest payment on some bonds two days late, thus creating a technical default and triggering the CDS, pocketing some gains for Blackstone at the expense of the CDS writers, without costing Codere anything -- is such a glorious pinnacle of financial achievement that of course someone had to make a television show about it. I would have preferred a prime-time miniseries, but what we got is a "Daily Show" segment, and that will have to do. Here it is.

The segment consists mostly of Samantha Bee going around to TV networks, newspapers and BuzzFeed and asking if they'd covered the Codere story and getting some variation on "no" for an answer. Except Bloomberg! Bloomberg News broke the story! No thanks to me of course,1but I will nonetheless choose to be filled with pride because I work at a financial media organization that covered a European credit derivatives trade that even BuzzFeed missed.